The Government of Ontario cares about manners and thinks guys should be nice to girls. That's the gist of the messaging in this commercial which points to a site called Equality Rules. In the commercial, almost directly opposite from a scene in last night's Friday Night Lights in which one of the characters working the register at the local fast food restaurant tries to pick up a girl by telling her what she really wants when she places her order, a mean spirited guy, for no apparent reason, berates a girl who's just trying to order a burger.

The Equality Rules site is filled with cheesy cartoon advice vignettes that seem almost purposefully to mirror high-minded finger-wagging you'd get from your grandmother after she caught you getting drunk with your friend on his Dad's boat. SInce all other angle seem to be taken on convincing people to be nice, maybe this one will actually work. The commercial was created by Toronto's Bensimon Byrne and produced by UNTITLED (yes, that's the name of the company).

With Winter approaching, Lynx (Axe in the U.S.), the only company that, over and over again, seems to successfully be able to milk sexual innuendo for all its worth has released yet another man-friendly amusement site filled with women who can't seem to kept their clothes on. This site, LynxBlow, offers visitors to the chance to help a poor, freezing woman standing in the snow warm up by, yes, blowing at her through your computer's microphone. Unfortunately - or fortunately for the viewer - when wind comes her way, her clothes get blown off. She doesn't seem to mind though and winks knowingly at the viewer like some sort of Eskimo exhibitionist with an Arctic freeze fetish.

Thankfully, through the kindness of our friends at Dare who worked on the creation of this visual pleasure, you don't even have to go thought the site set up to see the "goods." You can see all the best blow off scenes in a YouTube video here.

If you ever find yourself watching some obscure local TV station late at night in your hotel room while on some lame business trip in some lame city with your lame co-workers to pitch some lame client some lame new work your agency's done for them and a commercial like this one comes on, you just might quit your job immediately and enroll at The Viral Learning Center. Yes, you too can become a viral video expert.

At the Learning Center, you'll learn important viral video tactics such as filming yourself sitting at your desk, the art of falling, hurting animals, using animals to hurt people, working with excrement and vomit and "many more." This hilarious DRTV spoof takes whacks at both the DRTV genre and viral video itself all to promote, yes, a website that's all about viral video called Ziddio. It's one of those "we pay you for your video" site. Kind of like Revver with wit. American Copywriter points.

CMM News points to a Sydney Morning Herald article which calls to our attention the odd proliferation of videos on YouTube that show women smoking. Now that wouldn't be so weird except for the fact that in many of the videos, that's all they're doing: glamming on the cam while puffing away seductively. Sydney University School of Public Health Professor Simon Chapman viewed many of the 27,000 smoking-related videos on YouTube and while he acknowledges the videos could simply be an innocent social phenomenon, Chapman also wonders whether it's a clandestine effort by tobacco companies to promote smoking's cool quotient.

While tobacco advertising in America has been severely limited, it's been completely outlawed in Australia since 1992. Whether or not any tobacco company is behind this is likely to remain a mystery. A Philip Morris rep neither confirmed or denied involvement in with the video and said the company adheres to local laws and Internet advertising to minors should be banned. YouTube declined to comment for the story. While we find it hard to believe tobacco companies have any involvement in this and there's plenty of not-so-glamorous smoking videos to back up that belief, stranger things have certainly happened regarding this industry's marketing efforts.

Make the Logo Bigger sent us a promo video for the Burger King Xbox games we wrote about back in early October and even though we've hated that creepy King and bad product placements in video games, we're warming to the idea of video games that don't try to hide that fact they're all about advertising - as long as they're good. Besides, the creepy King seems to be much better suited to an appearance in a video game than in a video with Brooke Burke. There's a review of the game here.

With line-walking gratuitousness and the single statement that sounds like it belongs in a masturbation tutorial, "remain rigid and release," these two promotional videos for Stuff 4 Dudes ever so euphemistically promote the site's offerings, Yoga 4 Dudes and Ballwork 4 Dudes. Sure, they're not the newest thing out there but they offered up FishNChimps, the guy who sent them to us, an enjoyable break from his mission of finding methods to help him achieve his 2007 resolution: weight loss.

- Will Video for Food thinks a recent youTube featured video, One World, by MadV is part of a paid promotion for the supposed launch of his upcoming television show.

- Ad Agency North has drafted an extensive white paper on the rise of consumer control over media and advertising and how marketers can shift their efforts to better coincide with this new flow of information.

- The Web Marketing Association has announced its fifth annual Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards. The IAC Awards are an industry-based advertising award competition for online advertising. The Competition Web site is located at www.iacaward.org and the deadline for entry is January 31, 2007.

- Hmm, that was short. Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. fame has left AOL, the company that purchased Weblogs Inc. just over a year ago.

- Burger King has pissed off Spain with ads for its Double-Cheese Bacon XXL death burger because the ad runs counter to the country's recent efforts to lim down its society.

Way back in the heady days of 1998 dot com mania, an account director friend who, as much as we did, loved to sling around pompously pointless marketing blather and marvel at the ability of other to, as well, say so much while saying so little thought we'd write a book gathering together all the inanity. We never did but "seven words you can't say on TV" comedian George Carlin created a 3:42 bit on the same topic. For 3:42, he hilariously strings together the pointless blather that not only marketers but all people fling out of their mouths without fully considering how stupid it sounds.

Take note. More than half of what comes out of your mouth in that client presentation is mindless, pointless, idiotic sounding, space-filling blather. Don't you want meetings to be shorter? Aren't you sick of fake words that mean nothing? Wouldn't you rather be actually creating something rather than killing it with the boatload of words you throw at it before you ever show it to the client? Of course you would. So stop talking like an idiot.

So apparently today's the day Sony's Playstation 3 makes its retail debut and as is always the case, fervent fans have lined up at retailers across the nation to insure the are the first to pick up the new unit. Chris Thomas, director of national advertising for The Dave Ramsey Show, along with a few friends, decided they'd check out the dedication at one of there local Best Buys. They put together a video with interviews of those who've been living in tents in front of Best Buy for the past 24 to 36 hours and slapped it up on YouTube.